Check out the paper if you want to know more! Many thanks to the authors (@robindard.bsky.social, @juleslebert.bsky.social, @lana-smith.bsky.social, Axel Bisi, @aprrenard.bsky.social, Sylvain Crochet, and Carl Petersen), and the Petersen Laboratory of Sensory Processing at EPFL who made it possible!

These results help us reconcile parallel literature in context-dependent behaviors. RSC is the main cortical output of the hippocampus, and is involved in contextual fear memory, but had not previously been linked to context-dependent sensorimotor transformations.

Widefield calcium imaging revealed RSC to be the first brain region showing context discriminability following the whisker stimulus, followed by whisker motor cortex. In contrast, we did not observe major differences in the whisker sensory responses in primary and secondary somatosensory cortices.

An unbiased optogenetic inhibition approach showed some cortical regions necessary for the execution of the task, plus the involvement of retrosplenial cortex (RSC) to the proper contextualisation of the whisker stimulus.

We trained mice to respond to a brief whisker deflection by licking a water spout according to the surrounding context. Our mice were able to learn this dynamic contingency and adapt to context very fast after context transition.